Trance Is a Natural and Frequent State ...

Everyone experiences hypnosis daily. The resulting trance state is natural and occurs at various depths depending on what you're doing and how completely adsorbed you become.

Unlike Hollywood's version of hypnosis where people are mesmerized into mindless zombies by someone with the power, think of trance or hypnosis as the ability of your mind to lose itself in a good book, to become totally focused on an enjoyable conversation, or fall in love, and experience your perceptions in the trance state as real.

Think about it, when you watch your favourite movie you have the experience of being emotionally involved with the characters and being pulled along with the story until the end.

Completely gone from your awareness is the knowledge that what you are seeing is only a collection of still images flashing on a flat screen at 30 frames per second. It seems real. When the hero dies or looses the love of their life you feel it with them. When the big explosion happens, you duck. It seems real, it looks three dimensional, and yet it isn't.

This type of trance which I refer to as movie mode, is the hypnotic state you turn on just as the movie starts (otherwise you would be sucked in to all those annoying commercials), and which you turn off again as the credits roll.

So now that you know a little more about trance, let me go back to my earlier comment about experiencing love.

Of the many different trances we can experience, the love trance is probably the most enjoyable and desired.

Love trance is that hypnotic state of mind you enter when you meet someone wonderful and become totally absorbed thinking about them. Initially you are only aware of the enjoyable things about them, the colour of their eyes, the cute way they wrinkle their nose, the way you feel when they laugh or how time just seems to pass so quickly whenever you're together. That's all trance.

The love trance creates perception distortions called negative hallucinations which prevents you from seeing the flaws and annoying character traits that are so obvious to your friends who wonder why you can't see them too. More on hypnotic phenomena and other trance states later.

So in reality everyone experiences trance daily. You may not have recognized it as hypnosis or being hypnotized because you called it by one of it's many other names: creative visualization, meditation, day dreaming, prayer, reflection, driving, zoning out etc, or because you were expecting to experience trance as Hollywood portrays it.

So what is the difference between hypnosis and trance ? The practical answer is none, however to be correct hypnosis is a process used to create the trance state in self or others. So what happens when you create trance for a milli-second ? Well you have the experience you just had as your conscious mind goes inside and attempts to find the answer. This happens all the time in response to questions. So often that you don't pay attention to it, but that's still trance.

So, if you want to see what it looks like, then next time you're having a conversation with someone say this: You won't believe what [name: of some annoying friend or relative] did today. And then watch what happens as they go inside and try on all the different things that might have happened as they build a list of things that person might have done that are unbelievable. It will happen quickly, but you should notice a difference. By the way, what was the last book you can't remember reading called ? Who was the author ?

How many seconds did it take you to get here after you zoned out ? That's trance. It happens all the time.

Now if that's not exactly what you were looking for, and you want to experience classic hypnotic phenomena, or you just want more information, then drop me a note here and I'll do my best to answer it.

Until next time, I leave you to consider How long can you keep a reader in suspense ?

If you are creative, can visualize easily and open to imagining scenarios described to you, you are generally in the "easier to hypnotize" group. Actors are great for hypnosis, because as you describe things to them, they are used to putting their mindset inside the scenario a director might be describing to them. So they go into trance fairly quickly, and with amazing results!

I have to comment on the commercials and the credit rolls. I HATE THEM! I don't care who sponsored who or who or who produced what or yadda, yadda, yadda. When I read that paragraph, I got a great laugh. I thought everyone else actually looked at the credits.